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Mageia 8 is NOT relased yet. This is a work in progress

Contents

Introduction

Mageia is a Free Software operating system of the GNU/Linux family, which can be installed on computers either as the main operating system, or as an alternative system to one or several pre-installed systems (dual boot). It is a community project supported by the non-profit Mageia.Org organization of elected contributors. Mageia is developed by and for its community of users, and is suitable for all kinds of users, from first-time GNU/Linux users to advanced developers or system administrators.

The latest stable release of the Mageia project, Mageia 8, previously spent more than a year in development. It will be supported with security and bug fix updates for 18 months, up to XX XXXXX 202X.

Available installation media

Mageia has two distinct installation media types:

  • Classical ISOs (DVD 32-bit, DVD 64-bit), which use the DrakX traditional installer. The 32-bit and 64-bit DVD ISOs contain all supported locales, a great variety of packages to choose from (including most supported desktop environments) and all non-free drivers. The use of non-free packages can be disabled during the installation.
  • Live ISOs, which can be used to preview the distribution, are an installation alternative to place Mageia on your hard drive. Live media come with either the Plasma (64-bit), GNOME (64-bit) or Xfce (32 or 64-bit) desktop environments. The Live DVDs contain all supported locales, a wide hardware support, and a pre-selection of software, making them a quicker way to get started working with Mageia. Note that we added an optional persistence feature which preserves user files and customization of the system to next boot, optionally encrypted. Persistence mode need less RAM. Tip: For optimising you can uninstall packages, see Removing packages#Persistent Live USB and more on that wiki page.

All ISO images can be burned to a DVD or dumped on a USB flash drive. Please note the file and device size limits as, for example, a 4 GB ISO image can be too big for some "nominally" 4 GB USB drives, due to their actual capacity being slightly lower than the marketed size.

For more information, please have a look at our installation media manual page.

You will find the different download options on the Mageia 8 download page: direct (FTP and HTTP) and BitTorrent downloads are available.

The Mageia online repositories

The software packages that are included in Mageia sit in three different repositories/media, depending on the type of license applied to each package. Here's an overview of those repositories:

  • Core: The Core repository includes packages with free-and-open-source software, i.e., packages licensed under a free-and-open-source license. The set of the "Core" media along with "Core Release" and "Core Updates" are enabled by default.
  • Nonfree: The Nonfree repository includes packages that are free-of-charge and free to redistribute, but that contain closed-source software (hence the name - Nonfree). For example, this repository includes NVIDIA and AMD/ATI proprietary graphics card drivers, firmware for various WiFi cards, etc.

The Nonfree media set is enabled by default but can be disabled, if necessary, during the installation.

  • Tainted: The Tainted repository includes packages released under a free license. The main criterion for placing packages in this repository is that they may infringe on patents and copyright laws in some countries, e.g., multimedia codecs needed to play various audio/video files; packages needed to play a commercial video DVD, etc.

The Tainted media set is added by default but not enabled by default, i.e., it's completely opt-in; so, check your local laws before using packages from this repository.

Please also note that on a 64-bit system, the 32-bit repositories are configured, but they are not enabled by default. If the Nonfree or Tainted 64-bit repositories are enabled, the corresponding 32-bit repositories should also be enabled (both in Release and Updates flavors), as they are needed by some packages, such as PlayOnLinux or Steam. In case you want to install such packages that have dependencies on packages from 32-bit repositories, like PlayOnLinux or Steam, please make sure that you have at least "Core 32bit Release" and "Core 32bit Updates" enabled.

Release highlights

Faster package metadata parsing

Urpmi metadata are compressed with Zstd instead of Xz, resulting in faster parsing.

Python2 is mostly dead

Most python2 modules & software were removed.

ARM support

The ARM (Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Machine) port rebooted during Mageia 7 days has been enhanced. The core is available for ARMv7 and AArch64.

There is no traditional installer for now, and it is still considered experimental, but most of the distribution was built successfully on both architectures (see our ARM status overview for details). The plan is to provide installation images for popular ARM devices in the coming months. There is no ETA for those as of Mageia 8's release.

Drakboot is now somewhat able to set up UEFI on AArch64.

Major developments

Installation

Stage 1

  • Hardware support was extended to be able to start the installer on very recent computers
  • NFS support is done using system tools rather than our 15 years old forked NFS code, thus gaining support for NFSv4 & co...

Stage 2

  • Lots of bug fixes and improvements in the partitioner
  • Stage2 squashfs image is now compressed with Zstd instead of Xz for faster startup
  • File system support:
    • Support installing over F2FS (in expert mode)
    • Improved Nilfs2 support: can now be reformatted or resized (but is still not suitable as system FS due to missing features)
    • XFS can now be resized even if not on LVM (providing the partition has room to be enlarged)
    • exFAT file systems are shown like FAT & NTFS ones (but exFAT cannot be resized)
    • Windows 10 NTFS ("Compact OS") is now supported through the ntfs-3g-system-compression plugin (mga#21737)
  • Bootloader configuration is safer: we keep old grub.cfg around while update-grub2 hasn't overwritten it yet (mga#25542)
  • Minimal install on LUKS is bootable

Rescue

The rescue system has been enhanced:

  • it's slightly faster to load (less modules are loaded and we don't brute force the file system types)
  • it's able to repair encrypted LVMs/LUKS (mga#22795)

Live ISO

  • Live ISO boot and install is now much faster, due to optimised hardware detection and use of Zstd for compressing the base filesystem
  • Live ISO now boots without configuring X.Org, relying on automatic mode of X.Org
  • Diskdrake now supports adding partitions to Live ISOs on USB sticks (mga#25224)
  • The persistence partition for a Live ISO on a USB stick can now be encrypted (mga#25191)
  • The Live ISO installer now supports setting up of online media and installing updates

Hardware support

  • ARM v7 & AArch64 are now somewhat primary architectures in that all packages are now built there

Localisation (l10n) / Internationalisation (i18n)

Manuals

  • The manuals for the traditional installer and for the Mageia Control Center have been (partially) translated into many more languages. See our official documentation
  • An English screenshot is used when a localized screenshot is unavailable for an HTML manual.
  • PDF and EPUB manuals are created only when more than half of the needed localized screenshots for those manuals are available.

Software translations

New translations have been added, while others were improved. Thank you to our dedicated community of translators for your reliable work.

Package management

New RPM

RPM has been upgraded to version 4.16.0.

RPM 4.16 offers key improvements to RPM as a whole, including:

  • Add automatic SSD detection and optimization (on Linux, disabled by default)
  • Add filesystem sync at the end of transactions (rhbz#1461765)
  • Add SHA256 digest to gpg-pubkey headers too
  • Add support for meta dependencies (eg Requires(meta): somepkg) that do not affect install/erase ordering (rhbz#1648721)
  • Add support for parametric macro generators
  • Deprecate RPM v3 support, visibly (#1007)
  • Faster Operations:
    • Optimize several operations via parallelization up to %_smp_build_ncpus
    • Optimize several operations via thread parallelization up to %_smp_build_nthreads (but limited to maximum of 4 on 32bit platforms)
    • Add support for parallel processing in brp-strip
    • Prioritize large packages when writing packages
  • Backends:
    • Deprecate the Berkeley DB backend
    • Add independent implementation of read-only BDB support (experimental)
    • Add new SQLite based database backend (experimental)
    • Promote NDB out of experimental status

More information on changes from RPM 4.14 (which shipped with Mageia 7) to RPM 4.16 is available from the RPM website:

DNF: the alternative package manager

DNF (Dandified Yum) was introduced as an alternative to urpmi since Mageia 6.

DNF is a next-generation dependency resolver and high-level package management tool that traces its ancestry to two projects: Fedora's YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) and openSUSE's SAT Solver (libsolv). DNF was forked from YUM several years ago in order to rewrite it to use the SAT Solver library from openSUSE and to massively restructure the codebase so that a sane API would be available for both extending DNF (via plugins and hooks) and building applications on top of it (such as graphical frontends and system lifecycle automation frameworks).

DNF comes with enhanced problem reporting, advanced tracking of weak dependencies, support for rich dependencies (see the RPM release notes for more on this), and more detailed transaction information while performing actions.

Mageia 8 ships with DNF v4.2.23.

System upgrades using DNF are supported. See the section on upgrading with DNF in the release notes for more information.

More information on modularity: https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/

DNF release notes: https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/release_notes.html

With fresh installations via the classical and live media, DNF will be installed in parallel with urpmi. Depending on the method used to upgrade to Mageia 8, it may be necessary to install the dnf package to have it available.

For information on how to use DNF, please refer to the wiki page: Using DNF.

AppStream

Our RPM-MD (RPM MetaData) repositories (used by DNF and PackageKit) provide AppStream metadata. Tools like GNOME Software (GNOME Desktop, packaged as gnome-software) and Plasma Discover (KDE Plasma Desktop, packaged as discover) leverage AppStream metadata to provide a rich experience when searching, identifying, and managing applications.

AppStream is a cross-distribution effort for enhancing software repositories by standardizing software component metadata. It enables an application-centric view on package repositories and provides specifications for things needed to create user-friendly application centers.

See the AppStream website for more information: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Distributions/AppStream/

perl-URPM and urpmi

  • Doc has been enhanced (eg: URPM & urpm & CPAN)
  • urpmi/perl-URPM support a wider range of rpm versions, from rpm-4.9 to latest 4.16, from perl-5.8 to perl-5.32
  • Various bug fixes have been made
  • Urpmi supports the --reinstall option
  • Urpmi metadata are compressed with Zstd instead of Xz (faster parsing)
  • don't enable 32-bit media by default on 64-bit systems (mga#24376)
    • except on systems with 32-bit EFI, where we need the Core 32bit media for the bootloader
  • When adding distrib media, enable 32-bit media if needed (mga#24438)

Tools

Mageia Control Center

Other

MageiaWelcome

The 'Welcome' screen is an application that is presented to users when booting into a fresh installation of Mageia. It has now been entirely reworked to have a linear approach, with successive steps following in a logical order of important things to know and do post-installation. By default, it will run at each subsequent boot, but this behaviour is optional. Even if the auto-run option is disabled - it can be invoked at any time as an application (mageiawelcome).

Under the hood, it uses Python and QML. It is now resizeable and will use the fonts of the desktop environment.

Isodumper

Isodumper is a tool to write ISO images on memory devices. The checking routine after writing operations is looking now for a sha3 sum file and corresponding signature.

The added persistence partition can now also be encrypted. This will be recognized only for Mageia 8 and later ISO images. See here for more information.

Docker

The Docker ecosystem has been augmented (based on the 19.03 version of the engine) with many additional tools such as docker-compose (orchestration with v3 support), containered (daemon controlling runC), docker-registry (share of images), docker-machine (install docker on a remote system), and python-docker (python 2 and 3 libraries for engine API management).

LiveCD Tools

With Mageia 8, the LiveCD Tools have been rebased to the latest version (v27.0).

For information on how to use the LiveCD Tools, please refer to the wiki page: Using the LiveCD Tools

draklive2

The GUI mode has been enhanced to include the summary stage from the classical installer, allowing easy configuration of locales, timezones, system services, and firewalls. The individual package selection stage now includes a flat list mode, removing the restrictions on what packages can be selected.

For more information, please refer to the wiki page: draklive2

Base system

Kernel and hardware support

  • Mageia 8 ships with kernel 5.9.

All hardware managed by this kernel version is enabled. The kernel provides better graphics with Mesa 20.2.

  • Other kernel flavors are included, particularly, kernel-linus (a vanilla stock kernel without any extra patchset). See the wiki page Kernel_flavours for more information.
  • The Single-queue I/O schedulers were removed upstream since kernels 5.0 . If you need ionice utility, consider installing a new Template:Pkg package which enables BFQ scheduler for rotational disks.
  • cpupower and powersave

There were quite a few changes regarding this in 5.8. If using intel_pstate (for Sandy Bridge and newer Intel cpus), the default behaviour changed on CPUs without hardware-managed P-states (HWP) support, and you need to add the kernel parameter intel_pstate=active to restore previous behaviour if this results in worse performance for you. (See mga#27191).

Graphic drivers

Mesa has been updated to Mesa 20.2.

Graphical drivers now use the new vendor-neutral libGL implementation (colloquially "glvnd": GL Vendor Neutral Dispatch) which has been developed to address several issues with OpenGL support on modern Linux systems.

  • Users will have the ability to install Mesa and third-party GL drivers in parallel and have them actually work.
  • This enables additional performance and functionality for hybrid GPU configurations (high-end laptops, for instance).

X Window System (X11)

Mageia 8 ships with X.Org 1.20.9.

AMD video drivers

  • Mageia 8 uses the free video drivers for AMD/ATI graphics cards, AMDGPU for newer cards and Radeon for older graphics cards. Compared with Mageia 7, hardware support has been increased and performance has been improved.
  • The proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver currently only works with X.org 1.1xx, so it cannot be used in Mageia 8.
  • In case of a hybrid card, the solution exposed with the nouveau driver and the precommand DRI_PRIME=n is also working, at least with the radeon driver.

NVIDIA drivers

  • The current libre Nouveau drivers are provided. Compared with Mageia 7, they have increased hardware support and performance.
  • The packages for the latest NVIDIA (long-lived branch, 455.38 at the time of writing) proprietary drivers are provided in the nonfree media repositories.
Proprietary Nvidia driver

An upstream change in Kernel 5.9 no longer exposes some GPL symbols to a nonfree binary. See this commit change in Kernel here.

Current situation is that:

    • a "nvidia" module that permit a working GUI interface with 2D and 3D acceleration.
    • a non blocking kernel_trap on "nvidia_uvm" or "nvidia_drm" module at each boot that can be seen in system journal (mga#27435)
    • CUDA 10.2.89 is provided but no longer work under Kernel 5.9.x.
    • OpenCL also does not work at this time.

If you rely on these functions, we encourage to not upgrade to Cauldron or use 5.7.19 kernel from Mageia 7.

We are waiting an upstream change under Nvidia drivers.

  • For older graphics cards, the proprietary NVIDIA drivers of the 340 and 390 branches are also still provided (390 being supported on x86_64 only).
Optimus laptops

Owners of NVIDIA Optimus laptops (integrated Intel graphics processor and discrete NVIDIA GPU) now have three ways to benefit from the power of their discrete GPU:

  • The free Nouveau drivers support Prime GPU offloading out of the box, which can be used via the DRI_PRIME=1 environment variable (unless the proprietary NVIDIA driver is in use by, e.g., mageia-prime). Refer to the Nouveau documentation to see how to configure Xorg to use NVIDIA Prime with DRI3.
  • As in Mageia 7, the Bumblebee package can be used to bridge the monitor to the NVIDIA GPU, allowing to access its processing power albeit with some overhead.
  • A new experimental tool named mageia-prime can be used to configure the NVIDIA Prime supported by recent Linux kernels and Xorg servers. It allows to fully switch to using the NVIDIA GPU without the overhead of Bumblebee, and is particularly suited for use with CUDA.

In all three cases, when configuring the graphics drivers, one must only configure the Intel card (at least in most Optimus configurations), as it is typically the only one physically connected to a monitor.

Bootloaders

  • GRUB2 has been updated to 2.04, with several features & fixes backported from future 2.06 branch
  • For UEFI boot, the rEFInd boot manager is now supported as an alternative to GRUB2.

Desktop environments

All the desktop environments mentioned below are included in Mageia's online repositories, and can be installed in parallel on any Mageia 8 system. Some of them are also included on the physical media, LiveDVDs and Classical DVDs, as specified in each section.

Plasma

Plasma, the desktop environment from the KDE community, is provided as version 5.20.2.

If you want to try Plasma under Wayland, only install plasma-workspace-wayland, and it should appear in your favourite display manager's list of desktop environments.

Note also that Wayland session with Nvidia's 455 (current) nonfree-drivers is available by making sure that "nokmsboot" is removed and "nouveau.modeset=0" is passed to Kernel command line. This is provided as Technology Preview for testers.

The default display manager (DM) for the Plasma environment is Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM).

Plasma has a specific 64-bit LiveDVD and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

GNOME

GNOME 3.38.1 is provided. It now defaults to running on Wayland, but also provides an alternative "GNOME on Xorg" session. Note that with Nvidia's nonfree drivers, GNOME defaults to start a X11 session.

For those preferring the GNOME 2 look and feel, GNOME 3 also provides a "Gnome Classic" session.

GNOME has a specific 64-bit LiveDVD and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

LXDE

The very lightweight GTK+2-based desktop environment is still available and continues to receive improvements from upstream and our Mageia maintainer, even though its community has partly refocused on LXQt.

LXDE can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

Xfce

Xfce 4.14 is provided.

Xfce has dedicated 32-bit and 64-bit LiveDVDs and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

LXQt

LXQt 0.15.0 is provided.

LXQt cannot be installed out of the box from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer) due to space constraints on the ISOs. Online media need to be added to enable more options during the initial installation - this is explained in the installer documentation.

MATE

MATE 1.24.0 is provided.

MATE can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer). Due to DVD space considerations, some applications such as mate-screenshot (screenshot application) are not included in Classical DVD ISO. For a full MATE Desktop experience, users are advised to install Template:Pkg package after initial installation.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon 4.6 is provided.

Cinnamon can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

Enlightenment

The Enlightenment task package comes with E24.0 and Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) -- including the Elementary, Evas-generic-loaders and Evas-generic-players packages. Among the highlights of this version is Bluez5 support, an improved screen shot tool, more flexible music control module, the Evisum system monitor, and the now integrated Polkit-EFL authentication agent. For more details on this version, see https://www.enlightenment.org/news/e24.0.

Of course, Mageia includes E's Econnman UI for the connman connection manager, along with three EFL-based applications: the Terminology advanced terminal emulator, the nimble Ephoto image viewer, and the light-weight Rage video player. As with the prior release, Mageia 8 also offers a Mageia-branded theme as the default.

For those new or returning to E, startup processes and applications are not automatically picked up from /etc/xdg/autostart, but are enabled at startup by going to Main menu > Settings > Apps > Startup Applications and adding the desired applications and system processes. Enlightenment's system tray, which uses SNI appindicator notifications, is a separate module that must be loaded (Main menu > Settings > Modules) and added to a shelf (panel), where the Mageia online- and update-applets will be displayed along with others. Gtk applications with appindicators (e.g., Ubuntu indicator plugin for Pidgin) now have their icons correctly displayed as well.

Currently, there are two known issues. First, Mageia enables systemd-networkd to manage networking by default. Those who prefer to use connman with the Econnman interface will find it is not always functional (after disabling systemd-networkd and enabling connman.service), perhaps as a result of the default wpa_supplicant configuration. (There is a separate, recently-developed wireless gadget for managing multiple network backends that is not yet included in the Mageia repositories.) Second, the E17 themes still in the repository do not work with later versions of E. Additional themes may be found at https://www.enlightenment-themes.org/ -- just be careful to select up-to-date themes, as theming has been modified and icons added in the most recent releases of E.

Light window managers

You can also keep your Mageia 8 installation even more lightweight, and we provide for this a plethora of small and efficient window managers. You can find afterstep, awesome, dwm, fluxbox, fvwm2, fvwm-crystal, i3, icewm, jwm, matchbox, openbox, pekwm, sugar, swm, and windowmaker. After installation, they appear in the login menu of your display manager.

IceWM

You will now find both "icewm" and "icewm-session" in the login menu of your display manager (1.8.3).

Beginning with IceWM 1.2.13, there is a new binary named "icewm-session". This binary helps you to handle all IceWM subparts (icewmbg, icewm, icewmtray, startup, and shutdown, started in this order). Therefore, you should use icewm-session to start a complete IceWM session. Choosing "Icewm" will only start the window manager itself.

Office apps

LibreOffice has been updated to 7.0.2. See official release notes for details.

Multimedia apps

Since the last patent expired in April, 2017, mp3 encoding is now available in the core media. Tainted media are still needed for H.264, H.265/HEVC and AAC encoding.

Editors

  • Vim has been updated to 8.2.1522
  • NeoVim 0.4.3 is also included

Games

In the Mageia community, our love for free software extends to open source games. A huge effort has been made during the Mageia 8 release cycle to package many new games, making Mageia 8 a very good platform for intensive and casual gamers alike. You can check the Mageia App DB to see a list of all the new and updated games in Mageia 8. The following section will only give some cherry-picked examples for each game category.

Education

Mageia 8 comes with gcompris-qt 0.97 which brings some new activities. We were [1] among the donors in February, 2015, to improve the graphical interface of this very important project.

Software Development

Compilers and tools

GCC has been updated to 10.2, GDB to 9.2 and Valgrind to 3.16.1. LLVM has been updated to 10.0.0.

Firebird has been updated to 3.0.6

IPython has been updated to 7.15.

Most libraries were updated to recent stable versions (long-term support when available), such as Qt 5.15 and GTK+ 3.24.22. GTK is also provided at version 3.99 (GTK4) Tcl/Tk is at version 8.6.10.

Ocaml has been updated to 4.10

Java stack has been updated to 11, java 8 is still available but is not the default.

Mono has been updated to 6.10.

The MinGW stack has been updated.

Virtualization stack

QEmu has been updated to 5.1.

libvirt has been updated to 6.8, virt-manager to 3.1.0.

VirtualBox is at version 6.1.14.

Xen is at version 4.14.

Language stacks

Python 3 has been updated to 3.8.5. Python 2 is being retired (most python2 modules have already been removed).

Perl has been updated to 5.32.

Ruby has been updated to 2.7.1.

Rust is at version 1.46.0. It will be updated during Mageia 8's support life to follow new developments.

PHP has been updated to 7.4.10, which gives a further performance improvement.

Server applications

Nextcloud

In Mageia 8, Nextcloud comes in version 19. Mageia 7 came with Nextcloud 15 in core release repository. The Nextcloud installation must not skip a major version! Therefor *before* upgrading to Mageia 8, you have to update Nextcloud first to version 16, then to 17, then to 18. You find these versions in Mageia 7 backports repository. For each update also make sure you have apps updated (they are updated by using Nextcloud interface) and some are better disabled or uninstalled, and also verify Nextcloud works after each update, check logs. Before starting the process it is a very good idea to take backups. We have old instructions at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/OwnCloud#Upgrading - unfortunately not yet updated, but you get the picture.

MongoDB

The version of MongoDB server is 4.1.4. As the licence changed after this release and that new licence is not commonly recognized as open source, we don't have 4.2 release.

Upgrading from Mageia 7

Note:
Please also read the known issues page: "Upgrade Issues" chapter.

Upgrading from Mageia 7 is supported, and has been fine-tuned over the past few months, so it should work. But, as always, it is very advisable to back up any important data before upgrading and make sure you have made all updates of Mageia 7 (such as rpm and urpmi). Upgrading directly from Mageia 6 (or earlier distributions) is not supported.

A 64 bit system must have any 32 bit development libraries uninstalled first. You can identify these by the word "devel" in the name. To know if your system houses such libraries you can use the command:

rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}-%{version}-%{RELEASE}-%{ARCH}\n" |grep i586 |grep devel

If 3rd party repositories, such as Google, have been added during the use of Mageia 7, be sure to make a backup/copy of /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg.

There are several ways to upgrade from Mageia 7:

Warning: Upgrading an existing install using any of the Live images is NOT supported due to the Live image being copied "as is" to the target system.

If you want to upgrade a previous Mageia installation which was NOT in UEFI, towards a UEFI-mode Mageia 8, you have to do a complete installation. Direct upgrade is not supported.

Upgrading via the Internet

The Mageia Update notification applet, Mageia Online, will notify you that a new Mageia release is available, and ask if you wish to upgrade. If you agree, the upgrade will be carried out from within your Mageia installation without any further steps being necessary.

If you have disabled the applet or it is not automatically running for some reason, you can upgrade manually either using the GUI (mgaonline) or the CLI (urpmi/dnf system-upgrade). Each method is outlined below.

Fully update your system and check you have enough free space (at least 2 GB, depending on your configuration) before starting the upgrade.

Note:
Use a wired internet connection if possible, especially when you're using nonfree wlan drivers.

Upgrading online, using mgaonline (GUI)

If Mageia Online does not display a blue icon in the system tray offering you the option to upgrade to the new Mageia release:

1. Make sure that your system is fully up-to-date by applying all available updates. https://doc.mageia.org/mcc/8/en/content/MageiaUpdate.html

2. In Mageia Control Center - Software Management - Configure Updates Frequency, make sure that the option "Check for newer default releases" is selected. https://doc.mageia.org/mcc/8/en/content/mgaapplet-config.html

3. Look in your home folder for a hidden directory, .MgaOnline. If there is a file mgaonline in that directory, then delete that file.

After a reboot, the blue upgrade icon should appear when Mageia Online next checks for updates.

If Mageia 7 has reached EOL, you will see an orange icon and a pop-up warning that Mageia 7 is no longer supported.

Alternatively, you can launch the upgrade process by entering the following in a terminal:

su
mgaapplet-upgrade-helper --new_distro_version=8

It will notify you of the availability of the new Mageia 8 distribution, configure Mageia media sources and start the migration.

Upgrading online, using urpmi (CLI)

This method is useful when the root partition is encrypted as the booted system is already decrypting the partition.

There are multiple ways of getting a Command Line Interface (CLI).

The best method for performing an upgrade is to use run-level 3 so that the X server and graphical environment is not running.

Therefore, the upgrade should be cleaner using run-level 3 than using a terminal application as fewer programs are running which could potentially mess up the upgrade.

If you have dnf installed, you will have to stop the dnf makecache timer, because it causes a crash of urpmi when run during the upgrade. The commands are included below. See bug 25072

Run-level 3 can be enabled by appending "3" to the kernel command line by editing it at boot and to get then a login prompt. Other option is to use the command: systemctl isolate multi-user.target

It is recommended to run "script upgrade_log.txt" before to launch the next commands to capture the upgrade messages just in case a failure occurs. The messages will be written in upgrade_log.txt file. Use "exit" to quit out of "script".

Here are the general upgrade steps:

  • Become root in a terminal

Template:User to root

Warning!
From this point all the commands are executed as root
  • As recommended previously, be sure your system is updated
urpmi --auto-update --auto --force
  • Disable dnf makecache (this step can be skipped when dnf is not installed)
systemctl stop dnf-makecache.service
systemctl stop dnf-makecache.timer && systemctl daemon-reload
  • Remove all of the existing media sources on your system by executing this command:
urpmi.removemedia -a
  • Add the Mageia 8 online sources, either:
    • Using the MIRRORLIST method (which will select a mirror automatically based on your geographical location):
    urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist 'http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.8.$ARCH.list'
    (urpmi knows what to substitute for $ARCH)
    • Using a specific media mirror:
    urpmi.addmedia --distrib <mirror_url>
    You can get the mirror_url using the Mageia mirrors web application.
  • Finally start upgrading:
urpmi --auto-update --auto --force
  • It's best to run the above command twice because in the first run some packages may be downloaded but not installed.
Note:
It is sometimes a good idea, when you have more than enough free disk space, to test the upgrade before carrying it out.

With this command: urpmi --auto-update --auto --force --download-all --test all the packages are downloaded and the 'upgrade' is only a simulation. This needs a lot of free space before starting the test - like more than 40% free space on /var partition. If you have space on another partition, you can specify the destination of downloaded files by adding a path pointing to this partition after the --download-all keyword.
If the result is good, then upgrade for real with the command urpmi --auto-update --auto --force --download-all. Add also the path of downloaded files if specified previously. If the result is not good, restore the Mageia 7 repositories with urpmi.removemedia -a and urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist 'http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.7.$ARCH.list' like above.

Upgrading online, using DNF (CLI)

If you're using DNF for software management (and have it configured appropriately per the wiki page on using DNF), you can upgrade to Mageia 8 in just a few steps (note all commands must be run as root):

  1. Ensure you're fully up to date: dnf upgrade
  2. Ensure you have a lot of free space, like more than 40% free space on /var partition. If not, add the option --downloaddir path_to_directory_with_free_space to the next system-upgrade commands.
  3. Install the dnf system-upgrade plugin: dnf install 'dnf-command(system-upgrade)'
  4. Run the system-upgrade download phase: dnf system-upgrade --releasever 8 download --allowerasing
  5. If the simulation and proposed upgrade looks good to you, trigger the upgrade: dnf system-upgrade reboot

Using the traditional Mageia 8 DVD to Upgrade

You can use the traditional (so, non-Live) Mageia 8 DVD to do clean installs, but also to upgrade from Mageia 7.

To upgrade:

  • Download the ISO from the Mageia download page and burn it on a DVD, or dump it on a USB stick. For more details, have a look at this Available installation media article.
  • Boot the DVD and make sure it booted in the same mode (legacy/BIOS or UEFI) as Mageia 7 was installed in.
  • Select "Install Mageia 8" from the GRUB (the bootloader) menu.
  • Select the upgrade option.

It is recommended that the online repositories be set up during the upgrade as the DVD only includes a subset of the complete set of Mageia online repositories. This is especially important if you use important 32-bit packages in an otherwise 64-bit install, because the 64-bit ISO will only contain the 64-bit packages, so the upgrade is likely to fail if you do not add online repositories.

Moreover, it is possible that a particular Mageia 7 installation may have received an update to a later version of software than that available on the ISO. When this happens, an upgrade may fail to complete. At the time the ISOs are tested, it is impossible to anticipate which Mageia 7 packages may be updated in the future, so offline upgrades (i.e., upgrades attempted without setting up the online repositories) are not supported.

On the first reboot, use the command 'urpmi --auto-update' to make sure all packages were updated.

Upgrading an encrypted install

Firstly, on the running Mageia 7 system:

  • Remove unnecessary kernels, and big programs you do not need.
  • Perform a full update.
  • Make a note of which media are used, and have been used (Are any tainted enabled? If it is a 64 bit system, are any 32 bit media enabled?).
  • Make a note of which partitions are used, and their mount points.

Then prepare and boot the traditional installer as described above, and:

  • Select install, select language, accept the licence, select country, select keyboard, custom partitioning.
  • Click your encrypted partitions, select Use and enter your key.
  • If it is LVM a new tab containing the LV partitions appear.
  • Assign the mount points for all needed partitions except swap (as per your notes as above, or judge from partitions name, size, and type. Don't forget the /boot outside of the encrypted LVM!).
  • IMPORTANT: After clicking Next make sure to deselect formatting of all partitions! Or, if you want a fresh system but wish to keep user data: format /boot, / and any /usr /tmp etc you might have, but NOT /home.
  • You should enable all media repositories (using your notes as above) corresponding to those used in your previous Mageia installation - except backports.
  • As with a nonencrypted install, it is recommended that the online repositories be set up, including relevant update repositories.

Known issues

See the Errata page.

Bug reporting

We have a bug tracker, but please read the Errata before reporting any bugs. If you don't already have a Mageia account, you can create one on https://identity.mageia.org/. If you don't know, see how to report a bug.